Illicit economies and political opportunity. the case of the Colombian paramilitaries (1982-2007)

ABSTRACT

There is an ambiguous and complex role of narcotrafficking and illicit economies in the growth of the paramilitary political power and influence. As argued in this paper, there are four mechanisms through which criminal involvement politicized paramilitaries: escalation, extension, regulation, and intermediation. These mechanisms gave them the opportunity to decisively broaden their constituencies, legitimize their activity, network with clientelistic actors from a position of force, and significantly broaden their inroads. Nonetheless, as discussed in the paper, the paramilitaries got trapped by the coalitional mismatch between the two global wars that were being waged in Colombia: counterinsurgent and war on drugs.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics
• drug traffic
• clientelism
• armed conflict
• Colombia

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund under Grant [ES/P011543/1: ‘Drugs & (dis)order: building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war’].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Judicial decisions

Justicia y Paz

Judicial Proceeding Justicia y Paz (JP) 1: Diligencia de versión libre Salvatore Mancuso Justicia y Paz 20/10/2016Judicial Proceeding Justicia y Paz (JP) 2: Diligencia de desarrollo de contexto Ramón María Isaza Justicia y Paz 14/09/2015

Judicial Proceeding Justicia y Paz (JP) 3: Sentencia José Gregorio Mangonez Lugo y Omar Enrique Martínez Ossías Justicia y Paz 31/07/2011Judicial Proceeding Justicia y Paz (JP) 4: SENTENCIA JANCI ANTONIO NOVOA PEÑARANDA 21/10/2014

Judicial Proceeding JP 5: Diligencia de versión libre Salvatore Mancuso 21/10/2016

Judicial Proceeding JP 6: Diligencia de versión libre Rodrigo Pérez Alzate 22/07/2009

Supreme CourtJudicial Proceeding Supreme Court 1: SENTENCIA ALONSO DE JESÚS RAMÍREZ TORRES 24/02/2016

Juzgado de Ejecución de Penas de Santa Marta

Juzgado de Ejecución de Penas de Santa Marta 1: Delitos sexuales cometidos por Hernán Giraldo Serna, comandante del Frente Resistencia Tayrona de las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, without date

Juzgado de Ejecución de Penas de Santa Marta 2: Informe de policía judicial. Concierto para delinquir agravado. EXPEDIENTE 2013-00287 22/05/2013

Juzgado de Ejecución de Penas de Santa Marta

Juzgado de Ejecución de Penas de Santa Marta 1: Delitos sexuales cometidos por Hernán Giraldo Serna, comandante del Frente Resistencia Tayrona de las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, without date

Juzgado de Ejecución de Penas de Santa Marta 2: Informe de policía judicial. Concierto para delinquir agravado. EXPEDIENTE 2013-00287 22/05/2013

Notes

1. Not all of them were found guilty, but at the same time many politicians who were intimately related to the paramilitaries were not even tried.

2. See for example the RATE (Repression and the Escalation of Violence) project at http://www.sabinecarey.com/militias

3. For a discussion of the contributions and limits of this anyway extremely rich source, see Gutiérrez (2019).

4. The notion of political opportunity has indeed been criticized for being too elastic, but here I use it in a specific and restricted sense and intimately related to the four basic mechanisms of paramilitary politization I discuss throughout.

5. ACDEGAM had included narcotraffickers in its foundational meeting, but rather as junior partners.

6. During which Carlos Castaño himself was killed.

7. Yet it is not clear if this was true or not.

8. In the case of Doble Cero, he had become a nuisance for the two neighboring and highly narcotized paramilitary units, which eventually destroyed his Bloque Metro and then chased him down. In the case of Castaño, narco-paramilitaries probably came to believe that he was willing to sell them away to the United States or even to the Colombian authorities.

9. In both cases sometimes simply with the purpose of extorting.

10. This is Mancuso’s own version, which at least in its main contours is supported massively by other evidence (Lewin 2014).

11. Because of this, the paramilitary-guerrilla competition sometimes also gave peasants the opportunity to bargain and thus to improve their conditions – though of course they paid dearly for them in terms of violence and subordination.

12. In different places they may have ordered them to do so.

13. This observation does NOT imply the suggestion that the paramilitaries can or should be tagged as a Mafia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín

Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, is an anthropologist and political scientist, researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales (Universidad Nacional de Colombia). Recent books: ‘Clientelistic Warfare? Paramilitaries and the State in Colombia’ (Peter Lang, 2019) and ‘¿Un nuevo ciclo de la guerra en Colombia?’ (Random House, 2021) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9836-734X.